The Truth

by Naomi Joy

  The backs of my legs stick to the vinyl fabric on the hospital chair as I shift my weight forward and I’m still staring at the clock – 15:03:33 – when the uncharacteristically insistent winter sun breaks out from the clouds, a sliver of light emerging on the far right of the room’s frosty glass walls. The doctor doesn’t notice the ash-white rays, her head deep in my notes, her solemn, sombre tones falling on deaf ears. The sun, which should be dying this time of year, gathers in strength and speed and the shaft of light grows, its reflections bouncing energetically from pane to pane as more and more of the cloud gives way. I blink into the light. Soon it will shine over the entire hospital building, then snake its way through the skyscrapers of the busy city and over the green expanse of Regent’s Park towards Anthony’s apartment. I think about it, think how if I peel my legs up from this very chair and turn left, walk to the end of the corridor, past the four double doors of the Princess Anne wing and peer out through the window, I’d just about spot it in the distance.

  The doctor speaks again and pulls me back to the present.

  ‘Treatment plan… six months to a year…’

  Her fingers are interlaced and unmoving on top of her desk. Her pupils sit below a sharp fringe and bore into mine. I try to listen but I can’t, it’s too difficult, so I tear my gaze from hers and look into my lap instead. My hands are speckled and red from the sanitiser I shouldn’t have used, the nails on my fingertips painted a perfect navy blue for no reason whatsoever. What is the point of nail polish? What is the point of anything?

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  Her voice is raised and it occurs to me that maybe she’s repeating herself.

  ‘No, I…’

  ‘In that case, you can talk to our counsellor, or you can go and be with your family to process all of this. Either way, I’d urge you to speak to somebody, Emelia. In the meantime, I’ve put together this information. It explains what happens next. Give it a read when you’re ready and if you have any questions just give me a call. All right?’

  In that moment, I really want her to hug me, to grip my shoulders tight and tell me everything’s going to be OK.

  My lonely skin aches for it.

  Because the worst part of today won’t be the diagnosis, but Anthony’s reaction to it, I can already picture the smile he won’t try very hard to suppress, the corners of his hard lips flickering as I speak, happy creases erupting from the edges of his eyes and across his brow.

  Merry Christmas, Emelia. I’ve been planning this gift for a while, poisoning your food and weakening your immune system to the point that you had nothing left to fight with when the tumours started to spread. It’s not possible to give someone cancer, so they say, but my present to you this year would beg to differ. I’m so pleased that you like it, darling. It’s terminal, yes. Only the best for my darling wife.

  *

  Thank you, my dear followers, for all your lovely messages and wishes since my diagnosis. It has been a very difficult time but the doctors are staying positive so I must do the same. E x x x

  *

  I toss and turn in my hospital bed, my mind thick with turmoil and terror as I slip further from health, taking huge strides backwards in my attempts to get better, my latest diagnosis settling in. As the ward turns dark, I feel a presence fog my room and I hear the warning, the word – Run – and know I have to follow it.

  In the quiet of the night, my bare feet cold on the lino floor, I tell the receptionist on duty that I am going for a walk. She arches an over-plucked eyebrow and tells me to be back in five minutes, but she knows this ward is secure and that I can’t get out without assistance, or a keycard, so she’s not especially worried as I traipse away.

  I trace the corridors, passing private rooms and communal wards full of women with far-off expressions and haunted eyes and wonder how many others were forced and frog marched here against their will. I wonder how many others have cancer. I take a seat in the visitor’s waiting room and bring the bright light of my mobile phone to my face, tracing back to the message on my phone.

  Run.

  This word, this spectre that has followed me, has been unrelenting, and I let myself get caught up in the distraction, it saves me from thinking about today at least, and anything is better than that.

  Run. Run. Run.

  A thought swims quick, then bobs to the surface of my consciousness. Why don’t you call the number? My fingers swipe through the display and land on the person’s details – unblocked – hesitating for a moment before pressing the call button beneath. I shake the receiver up to my ear, silent for now, waiting for it to connect, a series of dial-up noises following and then, crystal clear, a connection.

  As I call the number, bare feet pressed into the floor, my long fringe flopping over my eyes, a sound down the hallway diverts my focus. Another phone is ringing, quiet, and it beckons me closer. Ringing, as I stand from my seat, pale legs shaking beneath my gown. Ringing, as I trace down the dark corridor to a section of private rooms I haven’t visited before. Ringing, louder, as the lights illuminate one after the other overhead, guiding my way. Ringing, loudest, as I turn to an open door at the end. I cancel the call on my phone and the ringing in here dies too. Convinced this must be a coincidence, I call again, dialling my harasser once more, my breath catching as it happens again and the ringing in here begins anew – chirping from the bedside table of a woman lying still, asleep in this bed.

  My breath is light, fast, as I pace into her room, the door ajar. She is ghostly, skeleton thin, her veins close to the surface of her translucent skin, and her heart visibly beats beneath the covers, working hard to sustain her fragile frame. I look closer at her face for the answers I need but I don’t find them. I turn away, looking round for more evidence of who this person is when I spot something unusual on the window: an open box of chocolates, the same as Anthony presented that night with Heather. The air conditioning fires overhead, startling me, pumping waves of cold air into the claustrophobic space and I shiver. Who are you? I want to ask, reaching out for her phone with greedy hands, when I hear a crack from her bed and she begins to stir, her tired mouth groaning with the effort of waking up. I do not push it any further, I do not want to be caught in here, spying on someone, so I move from her bedside and hurry out into the dark corridor once more, lights turning on again as I emerge and an alarm is activated, calling a doctor to her room. She’s a high dependence patient – they all are down this end of the ward – and I glance back at the name on the doorway as I scuttle away, losing my breath, and nearly my balance, as it comes into focus.

  Holly Madison

  *

  I walk back from the main ward to my room, the intensity of the emergency gathering pace behind me. I glance at the name label that marks it as mine: Emelia Thompson-Lyon. What I wouldn’t do to scrub his name from mine, I think, as I lift a finger to the plastic and scrape my fingernail across it. A thin white line appears after my second attempt and winks at me, our little secret, as I dip under the doorframe and into the room.

  As I fall asleep that night, my mind is full of her, of the invisible girl I’d assumed Anthony had killed but, as far as the evidence suggests, lives. Did he want both Holly and me in the same hospital so it’s easier to visit his dying girls? How many others here are his? Does anyone else know? Outside, sirens glow red and a full emergency is declared on the ward. I hear shoes scuff the floor and shouts of alarm. Holly, I hear someone shout, and I know then that the emergency must be for her, that the panic outside and Anthony’s increasingly frequent visits have been because of her worsening state. I force my head to turn towards the glass of the door and, just as I’m opening my eyes I see her – blackened eyes and thick bruises smudged into her skin, her mouth wide, lips crusted, lungs out of air. I just know, as she’s wheeled past my door, that she is dead.

  Anthony’s omnipotent presence in the ward looms large: he wants the same for me. All this time I ignored her, didn’t consider who was behind the
warnings, didn’t investigate the notes then, when she could no longer deliver them in person, her texts. Her death is my final clue. She was waiting for me to find her so she could die.

  I steel myself, again, because I know what I have to do now. I have to fight back. Plan B.

  For Holly now too, and the others, not just for me.

  Part 3

  Blog Entry

  21st December, 11.05 a.m.

  The flat is covered in Christmas: green tinsel sags over picture frames like spiny caterpillars, candles fill the air with pine scented fog, and an artificial tree is choked with white lights in the hallway. I feel my dad grip my shoulder. ‘I wonder where he is?’

  Twenty-four hours ago, I had to tell them the three words no parent ever deserves to hear from their child: I have cancer.

  They’d regressed to the mum and dad I’d seen in the days after my sibling died in hospital. They’d retreated into themselves, had journeyed through grief cycles of blame, anger and sadness and, finally, I’d let them visit, let them take me home. With my parents in tow, I was discharged from hospital shortly afterwards. The heavy metals had disappeared from my system, I had a treatment plan and, now that I had some people to support me and the doctors knew what they were dealing with – aggressive tumours spanning the length of my torso, tucked in the crevices between my organs, attached limpet-link to my lymphatic system – there was no reason to keep me in. I would start chemo to shrink and burn them out, then surgery, if necessary.

  We’d agreed we’d tell Anthony together, my parents chatting productively and pro-actively in the car about it on the way over, but we’re back now and…

  He’s not here.

  Blog Entry

  21st December, 6.22 p.m.

  My parents have just left, though I tried to get rid of them sooner. Mum had sat for hours wrapped in Dad’s arms on the sofa in the lounge. He’d rubbed her shoulders as though she were the invalid, as if he was more frightened about losing her than losing me. He probably was. The look in her eyes told me she was already half gone. They’d shoved their togetherness in my face, so overtly emotional, hugging and crying, holding on to one another as though their lives depended on it, like teenagers at the end of an alcohol fuelled party, while I’d flitted and floated from room to room, listless.

  Flicking on my bedroom light, I’d paused, my gaze on our bed. It had been meticulously dressed, almost eerily so, the scatter cushions had been plumped, a cashmere throw pulled taut across the foot. Anthony’s precise, certainly, but is he—

  I’d cut off my train of thought, setting down my hospital bag, wandering in, scanning the surfaces. I’d held open the wardrobe door, touched my clothes within, skated across the bookshelf, checking the spines were all in order, not sure exactly what I was looking for.

  In the bathroom, I’d coupled my toothbrush with its holder and thrown away an empty tube of toothpaste from the side. In my peripheral vision, that’s when I’d noticed it: the hair. A clump of brown strands trickling incriminatingly over the lip. Were they mine? I’d looked closer. Someone had been here. Someone else. As I’d stepped back, I’d noticed the bathroom cabinet under the basin was open too, shampoos and conditioners rearranged, strange fingertips pressing prints onto my things.

  From the hallway I’d heard my parents call out, they wanted to get home, keen to beat the traffic back to Kent.

  ‘Ems,’ my dad had said, briefly letting up from comforting Mum, his tone high pitched as he’d gulped to swallow the lump in his throat. ‘You’re going to beat this, OK?’

  He’d held me in his sad stare for a moment, then broken away, his attention back on Mum as she’d gasped by his side.

  ‘I just can’t believe this is happening.’ She’d covered her bewildered face with her hands, probably already weighing up which magazine to call first. ‘Our family has had nothing but bad luck. It’s like we’re cursed.’

  I close the door behind them now and grab my laptop so I can write. You, my followers, are the only people who keep me going. You are my support system. I turn to you when things get tough, not my parents, not my husband. You. So, thank you, again, for being here. For reading. I will keep writing, I promise. E x x x

  Blog Entry

  21st December, 7.20 p.m.

  Anthony appears in the evening and I’m sitting in the lounge, lights off, the blue of the night colouring the room, picking at the loose flakes of skin that peel in strips if I catch them right. The silver moon is bright beyond, my eyes full of it.

  His shoes pace the wooden floor in the hallway, trace to the kitchen, stop, start, then head to the lounge in search of me. I can tell, when he finds me, that he already knows.

  ‘Darling,’ he sighs. ‘Come here. Why didn’t you call me?’

  He twists my body into a reluctant embrace and cradles my head behind his hand. He kisses the nape of my neck and squeezes my waist. He holds me tight, like that, my face rubbing against the rough collar of his T-shirt, for a number of suffocating minutes.

  ‘I caught up with the doctor,’ he mumbles in the dark. ‘And I want you to know I’ll be here for you until, well, until whatever happens.’

  Until I’m dead.

  I go to speak but he shushes me and carries on. ‘You don’t need to worry, Emelia.’

  The fire crackles in the corner, a word blazing between the flames. Run. But a new plan is forming in the gaps between.

  It’s not about running any more, it’s about fighting.

  My husband, sniffling and weak on the outside, has fooled everyone. He killed his exes and made it look like suicide, starved Holly Madison until she died, poisoned me until my body contracted cancer, and he’s done all this without raising so much as an eyebrow.

  Time for it to stop.

  Time for Anthony Lyon to get a taste of his own medicine.

  Blog Entry

  22nd December, 1.05 p.m.

  The smell is musty, ratty, when I open the door to my studio. Anthony isn’t nearly as concerned with my comings and goings now that I am destined to die. I haven’t been here for a while and the damp – kept temporarily at bay by the re-paint just before I moved in – is back with a vengeance. I become reacquainted with the sad vinyl countertops, the saggy airbed, covered by a stained duvet on top, the patchy lino floors, the mouldy-edged bathroom, growing colonies round the rose patterned tiles. If I’d had any sense I would have kept the heating on, but, apparently, I don’t, so I hadn’t.

  I pick up what I need, a selection of the items I’d bought when I first moved here – syringes, battery acid, rodenticide, painkillers – and head back to Anthony’s flat.

  Once there, I open the fridge door, the light illuminating my face, a blast of cold against my thin body. I take a long look at its contents then, eventually, I pick up the first item.

  Blog Entry

  22nd December, 1.55 p.m.

  I can’t get hold of Mishti but I’m anxious and nervous and I just need to get out of this place, so I decide to call in on her like people used to do in the olden days. If she’s not there I’ll try again later.

  Mishti’s apartment is on the ground floor and an elaborate wreath hangs from the door handle. I have to hold it to one side to get to it, its thorny decorations tugging my skin as I knock.

  ‘Emelia,’ she says, answering the door, surprised to see me. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. Is everything OK?’

  She doesn’t stand aside to let me in and I worry I’ve made the wrong decision. She doesn’t want to see me, our friendship isn’t ready for this yet, she’s going to turn me away, say this isn’t a good time.

  I look at her and don’t say anything aloud, but with my eyes I tell her how I feel: No, I’m not OK. I desperately, desperately, need a friend, and you’re the only one I have. She relents.

  ‘Where are my manners! Come in, come in, you must be freezing,’ she says busily, loudly, opening the door wide. ‘It’s so good to see you out of hospital.’

  Her central heating hits me at th
e same time as the black and white marbled floor in the entranceway, the heavy chandelier overhead, the gold-framed artworks on white walls beyond, an emerald grandfather clock chiming for a new hour.

  ‘Wow, this place is amazing.’ I exhale, stepping inside, slipping off my shoes, taking it all in. Orchids on windowsills, designer luggage in the corner, impressionist artwork on the walls.

  No matter how rich you are, there are always people who have more.

  She surprises me by touching my arm rather than enveloping me in a hug. ‘I’ve been so worried about you, Emelia, how are you feeling?’

  She is distant, icy, her eyes as cold as the sapphires in her ears. ‘Let me just grab Eva’s stuff, we can go out for coffee, if you like?’

  ‘If it’s OK I’d rather stay here,’ I reply, downtrodden. ‘I don’t want to be in public.’

  Her face clouds and I wonder if she knows already. I wouldn’t put it past Mum to have put out some macabre public broadcast on my behalf. I spot a collection of family photographs on a console table in the hallway but am surprised that none of them feature Damien and it occurs to me I have no idea what he looks like. I’d always imagined him like the actor by the same name: the burns-easily-in-the-sun type, a shock of strawberry blonde hair atop his pale head, freckles dotted like confetti across his face; tall, blue eyes, handsome.

  ‘Is Damien home?’ I ask.

  ‘No, of course not, I can’t remember the last time he was…’ She trails off, clearly things are still bad between them. ‘What was it you wanted to tell me, anyway?’ Mishti asks nervously, poking my gloves onto what look like designated glove holders in the coat cupboard. Good lord.